Paper prototyping: mLibrary 2012 presentation

One thing that I don’t touch on in the presentation is the variety of prototypes that could be constructed, the talk only covers paper prototyping, and, particularly, not wireframes, low and high fidelity prototypes. Each has its own advantages, probably the subject of another post if asked about in the comments.

While paper provides significant examples, particularly for encouraging participatory design, at Hedtek we have moved on from paper protyping, preferring to deliver working code and UIs as part of our agile practices. Hey, different stokes for different folks! We are lucky enough to have skilled developers who can modify delivered functionality and user interfaces to order.

But this agile practice is not always the case, recently I’ve been sketching and, through sketches, exploring interfaces with one of our clients who wants to break new ground in computer-supported decision making.

2 Comments

I, for one, would be interested in a depth look at different design tools and approaches as you describe above. As someone who believes that libraries are generally very bad at UX (while being very good at the data and workflows which underpin good interface design) this would be an invaluable contribution to demystifying the field and making these techniques easier to adopt.

The kinds of thing on my mind would be the effort required to implement a technique (how much technical expertise, for instance?) vs the kinds of feedback you can expect, and approaches to managing expert vs real world user input (are various techniques more appropriate than others? Can you use a hybrid set of approaches for different audiences over the timeframe of developing a new system?)

I’m also very keen to find a copy of the LibUX report you mentioned but it doesn’t seem to be available yet?

At least some of your wish is my command, please find the report in our next post, here.

You pose an interesting set of questions, while I have some writing tasks to take care of in the short term, I’ll have a think about how to summarise some kind of answer for you, if I can’t easily find a good pre-existing source of information on this.